Sad Day for the Adventure Community

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GreyFussAdventurer Extraordinaire

Posts : 1948Reputation : 0Join date : 2009-12-13Location : Iron Age

Subject: Sad Day for the Adventure Community Mon Sep 17, 2012 11:42 pm

Sad day for the adventure game community as it looks like Interact will be closing its doors for ever. Not officially official but it looks like it is likely. I just talked to Dave on the phone to express my sadness as he has been a good friend to me and especially all of us

Here is what Dave posted over at GB...

Quote :

I thought I would come on and provide a personal update as to our situation. Thanks to Ana for keeping you all updated via proxy recently.

As some of you may or may not know, the past few years our brick and mortar retail business has been almost exclusively DVD driven. We buy, sell and rent Used DVDs and Blu-Rays. The in-store PC gaming business, which is what we opened with in 1994, has become nearly non-existent. I have continued to carry PC adventure games primarily for our online customers, most of whom come to us through Gameboomers.

Recently, as more and more of our in-store customers migrate to services such as Netflix and Redbox, our in-store DVD sales have begun to diminish as well. About 6 weeks ago I made a deal with our landlord. Cut our rent in half and you can put the space up for lease. Once you lease it, we'll leave in 30 days. Which is where we still are today. We have heard that there may be a lease ready to be signed, which would mean that our 30 days could start very soon. Once it does, we will close and go away forever within that 30 days.

To add a complication to all of this, our website died last week. Our website has been hosted, from what I understand, on the same server for about 10 years. We were the only site hosted on that server and it finally died. We haven't paid for hosting in at least 5 years. At this time it is unclear if it is even possible to access our site to move it or if there is a valid backup anywhere. And with 30+ days left, the motivation to find those things out is minimal.

What does this mean for Boomers interested in Sherlock Holmes? I am bringing in 20 copies of the game. They will be $39.95 each plus shipping. We should have them well before any 30 day period could elapse. If you want one held for you, you can e-mail me at interactstore@gmail.com (please don't use the old dave@interactcd.com or any other interactcd.com address) and I will hold one for you. Once I have the game, I can send you a PayPal invoice or you can call me (800-479-1323) to give me a credit card. Once those 20 copies are gone, I doubt I will order more, unless the current lease deal falls through and we're assured of staying here for more than a month or so.

(I should also mention that if you pre-paid for a copy of Bracken Tor, that's not looking so good right now! I will be sending out refunds at some point, but if you'd like to apply that toward Sherlock, that would work as well).

I'll come back and update this when I have a firm end date (or any other news), but I wanted to keep you appraised as I feel that I owe you all that much. You've been a wonderful group of customers and supporters for years and I appreciate it very much.

Thanks for posting GreyFuss. I just read the news over at GB myself and was at a loss of how to post this sad news. Dave and Interact have been good friends over the years and have provided us adventure gamers with many adventure games. Dave and Interact will be sorely missed by the gaming community and by me.

So that's what happened to the above Interact link. I clicked on it yesterday and got a couldn't-be-found message. I thought it was just me or my computer that goofed and I even thought about asking for help here, but then I got lazy and just didn't bother. And now, here is my answer and I'm really sorry to hear that the link is no longer valid. I will miss it and Dave.

I didn't know anything about Interact and I will certainly won't miss it. But it is still sad. Thank God there are many ebay and Amazon shops where everybody can buy adventure games. And there is still cd access with many classic adventure games. The Mods could probably replace the interact logo from the website and forum with the one of cd access.

A sad day when any gaming retailer closes , let alone someone that carries adventure games . I've made my first , and hopefully not my last , purchase from Dave , a copy of Testament of Sherlock Holmes .

Crap, that is bad news and sad news. I only purchased from Interact! a few times, but I had nothing but good experiences in doing so. Did not know Dave personally, but I always heard he was a standup guy and a boon for the adventure community. Losing the website though, that could be a bit hard to come back from, even in the lease thing falls through, and he can keep the space for brick/mortar store. Honestly, I would have ditched the brick/mortar element long ago and just tried to make a go of it as an online only presence. Yet the competition is tough, economy is tough, and adventure community still has a small stature in total number of interested people.

Thanks Dave no matter what happens. I appreciate your helpfulness and proffessionalism in making sure every customer ended up a happy customer.

I couldn't agree more. I only purchased games from Dave at Interact if at all possible. You know that stuff that is so rarely found? Customer service? That's what he had in spades and it meant enough to me that I would have gladly paid a bit more for games from Interact for that reason alone. A very sad day indeed...